SNS Europe Data storage and IT management:

Monitor corporate data storage visually in the cloud

New features include Heat Maps for TSM, more efficient software stack management, and Dynamic API program.

Date: 23 May 2012

Debriefing Software has announced a major upgrade to its Wizards for Storwize application, Heat Maps for TSM, an enhanced Wizards Control Center (WCC) and the availability of its new Dynamic API program.

“Corporate IT departments need tools that allow them to manage and optimize operations with minimal time input. Resellers and users of Wizards Storage Portal will know how the service frees up valuable time for other tasks in the IT department. With the new features we are launching today, Wizards Storage Portal offers great new visual tools for monitoring storage resources, while several administrative tasks have been further simplified,” said Paul Ström, Sales Director at Debriefing Software. “Releasing resources to drive business innovation initiatives in the data centre and other critical areas.”

The Debriefing Software Wizards Storage Portal is a non-intrusive, cloud-based, pay-as-you-use storage resource management (SRM) solution designed to reduce and optimise storage and backup costs for mid-sized and large IT infrastructures. The service is offered to corporate users through a network of IBM specialist service providers and resellers.

Wizards for Storwize and SVC Upgrade
Debriefing Software this week announced a major upgrade to its Wizards for Storwize, responding to requests from customers for increased reporting information functionality. Jesper Matthiesen, Debriefing Software CTO, said: “Among the many new features, we have added new advanced reporting tabs so now it’s easy to visualize and compare different nodes’ workload and throughput. The counters and graphs help users quickly identify why servers may have long response times and then take the necessary corrective actions. Other improvements include a more descriptive error log which will help system administrators understand more quickly the cause of a problem.”

Wizards Control Center Upgrade
The new version of the Wizards Control Center WCC has been simplified to allow automated upgrades of the client-side monitoring plug-ins. WCC now handles the entire life cycle of the application stack, and new plug-ins can also now be downloaded, installed, updated and uninstalled directly from within the WCC rather than needing to launch from the download page.

Heat Maps for TSM
Also launched this week has been the addition of Heat Maps for TSM which is unique to cloud-based applications. Heat Maps is an innovative tool for discovering usage patterns in large datasets by providing a coloured heat map that lets you review up to 60 days of activity, easily pinpointing nodes that perform above or below average and identifying cyclic performance issues that would be hidden in traditional reports. The analysis allows you to then optimize the system workload before you run into serious bottlenecks. Matthiesen said: “With the Heat Maps for TSM you can visualize and compare different nodes’ workload and throughput to determine how to best maximize the performance of your servers.”

WSP Dynamic API
The Wizards Storage Portal Dynamic API is an industry first. It delivers custom-designed integration tools that enable end users, resellers and service providers to integrate the data that sits in the Wizards Storage Portal cloud with their own applications. Matthiesen added, “Usually an API consists of a number of predefined functions that deliver specific information. The Debriefing Software WSP Dynamic API does more than that. WSP Dynamic API puts you in the driver’s seat, letting you design the integration you need.”

Paul Ström, Sales Director added, “We strive to continually enhance usability and add important features to Wizards Storage Portal. We work to improve our service offering based on specific requests from partners and end users. These latest additions exemplify this approach, and our reseller partners will be able to take advantage of these improvements to provide compelling services to their customers with Wizards Storage Portal.”